The Fondazione Prada in Milan is one of several cultural institutions to offer virtual tours during the Covid-19 pandemic. Image: Gaetano Cessati via Unsplash.

Get a bitesize overview of the week’s headlines and events with Icon’s weekly round-up

SCENE

OBITUARY The Italian modernist architect Vittorio Gregotti has sadly passed away, aged 92, after suffering from the Covid-19 coronavirus. Gregotti was an intractable presence in Mediterranean architecture for half a century. He was a pioneer in the architectural exhibition, curating with Umberto Eco the influentual 1964 Milan Triennale and the architecture section at the Venice Biennale for two editions in the 1970s. He also edited the architecture magazine Casabella. Gregotti’s major built works included the renovation of a 1929 stadium for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the Università Bicocca in Milan, and the ZEN housing estate in northern Palermo, an area that has since become a byword for urban dilapidation.

SANITARY SAVIOURSThe French luxury goods giant LVMH has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by redeploying its perfume factories to create hand sanitiser. The gels will be delivered free of charge to hospitals around the country, for as long as they are required. Somewhat more incongruously, Brewdog has announced a similar scheme around its Scottish breweries, and the design studio Bompas & Parr have launched Fountain of Hygiene, an open call competition for designers to propose new models of hand-dryer pumps. Entrants are slated to be displayed in the Design Museum, then auctioned at Christies’ in support of the British Red Cross. Over in Spain, meanwhile, fashion behemoth Zara has committed to delivering 300,000 surgical masks to the country’s health authorities.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHEDEarlier this week, news broke that a group of volunteers in Brescia — the second largest city in Italy’s hard-hit Lombardy region — had successfully managed to 3D print a valve used in coronavirus treatments. The valve manufacturer has since threatened to sue the volunteers for patent infringement, even after their work had saved 10 lives and been praised by Italy’s Minister of Technological Innovation. ‘The patients were people in danger of life,’ said Cristian Fracassi, one of the volunteers, ‘and we acted. Period.’

BLUE LAGOONAs cities across the world enter lockdown, spare a thought for Venice. Barely recovered from its ravaging by floods last November, the floating marvel’s reliance on international tourism has made it particularly susceptible to the Covid-19 economic effects. Amidst these anxieties, there has been one side-effect that might give the city pause for how it functions post-pandemic: denizens have reported that the city’s canals are clear for the first time in memory, with visible schools of fish. Elsewhere in Italy, including the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, the lack of shipping traffic has allowed dolphins to swim into harbours.

The Box in Plymouth is among the new cultural institutions to delay its opening. Image courtesy of Atkins.

DIARY

COVID CANCELLATIONS As the coronavirus epidemic waxes, cultural institutions across the world have closed their doors and postponed exhibitions. This week Britain and Sweden followed suit. In London, the Design Museum, the V&A, both branches of the Tate and the Barbican were among those closing for the foreseeable future. New cultural institutions, including the Oslo Central Library and The Box in Plymouth, have announced indefinite delays to their planned spring openings. And some intriguing exhibitions that were slated to open this week — including Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Paris! at the Centre Pompidou — will not. There have also been further event cancellations and rescheduling, with Clerkenwell Design Week moved from May to July and NYCxDesign pushed back to October. Since the Venice Architecture Biennale was bisected and moved from late May to August, no further announcement has been made, while the committee of the Salone di Mobile are due to make a decision early next month as to whether the fair will go ahead in mid-June as announced earlier this month.

ONLINE SUSTENANCETour from HomeWith the blitz of closures mentioned above, many of the exhibitions and events slated to open this week will no longer do so. In what amounts to a rapid response to the virus’s disruption, however, many institutions have begun to place their work online. The Fondazione Prada in Milan, for instance, has announced virtual tours of all three of its present exhibitions, and will turn its website and social media into a ‘laboratory of ideas.’ In nearby Turin, the Castello di Rivoli art museum has launched tours and videos for its exhibitions under the name Digtal Cosmos, while across the Alps the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève has opened its '5th floor', which features videos, music and a text archive. And, for the duration of March, the Milan Triennale is playing homage to Bocaccio's Decameron with a daily broadcast of stories on its Instagram channel.

Savage BeautyGalway’s year as European Capital of Culture has suffered from a huge number of cancellations, among them Finnish artist Kari Kola's Savage Beauty, a spectacular light art piece that would colour-wash the mountains and bogs of Connemara with 1,000 lights. It had already been pushed back after Storm Ciara last month. By way of recompense, the enormous work has been uploaded in video form.

Exploring the ArchivesThe four-venue exhibition Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, which tracks radical art, design, and architecture in the US’ sixth most populous city, has closed for the remnants of its run. But its extensive online archive, covering everything from postmodern pioneer Robert Venturi to the furniture designer George Nakashima, remains accessible. Cambio, Formafantasma’s wood-focused exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London, also has a companion website, which compiles interviews with environmental and tree experts along with an extensive linked list of further reading.

Virtual RepositoryAnd then, of course, there’s Google Arts and Culture: the tech giant’s digitalisation project that has complied collection highlights of over 1,200 museums worldwide. Constantly updated with new selections and virtual tours, its collections include such design-centric venues as the V&A, Designmuseum Danmark and the Bauhaus Dessau.

The Icon team has now de-camped from the office and will be in post remotely. At this trying time, the would like to share our warmest solidarity with the design community.

Icon editor Priya Khanchandani speaks to the exhibition’s curator and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hashim Sarkis.

Architecture’s greatest show in Venice will go on as planned, despite Italy’s current outbreak of coronavirus. It will explore the capacity of architecture to absorb to accommodate and encourage people to come together in times of increasing economic inequality and political polarization. Curated by architect and academic Hashim Sarkis, the biennale will investigate how the profession can act as a ‘convener and a custodian of the spatial contract’.

Priya Khanchandani: Why did decide to post the question ‘how will we live together?Hashim Sarkis: The question is at once an ancient one and an urgent one. It is also as much a social and political question as it is a spatial one. Aristotle asked it when he was defining politics and he came back to propose the model of the city. Every generation asks it and answers it differently. More recently the Rapidly changing social norms, the growing political polarization, climate change, and the vast global inequalities are making us ask this question more urgently and at different scales than before. In parallel, the weakness of the political models being proposed today, compels us to put space first, and perhaps like Aristotle, to look at the way architecture shapes inhabitation for potential models for how we could live together.

PK: How can architects encourage us to connect with one another better?HS: Architects are conveners. This is inherent to what architects do. The architect, by contract, synthesizes and coordinates among different fields and professions and represents them in front of the client. She is the custodian of the contract. In order to make a building and build it, architects have to bring together and coordinate among different parties. But beyond that, architecture, in a very evident way, suggests possible social organizations through the way it organizes, sequesters, and connects spaces. It also shapes the monuments, the memories, and the expressions of societies and groups and creates a common language with which they shape, debate, and communicate their experiences and cultures.

PK: What is the scope for architecture to take on this challenge in an age of digital spatiality and communication?HS: We have tried, and continue to invent, different means to connect with one another. But somehow, the more technologies and media we invent to achieve that, the more the interpersonal personal spaces that architecture provides become more meaningful. This does not mean that these two kinds of spatiality are mutually exclusive, or that ‘this will kill that.’ To the contrary, we live in an increasingly interwoven space between the virtual and the real and the exhibition highlights the potential of such hybridity.

PK: Which pavilions are you looking forward to seeing most and what do their entries entail?HS: As you know, when it comes to the national pavilions, each country has its own selection process that is independent of the curator. I do like this separation because it allows each country and its national pavilion curator to interpret the theme differently. It gives more diversity to the Biennale and more dimensions to its theme. There are many new voices this year, and I am eager to hear what they are going to say. There are also countries that join the biennale for the first time. I am looking forward to welcoming them along with and among the rest.

Grcic’s deep dive into MAXXI’s archive uncovers ‘fantastical architecture’, but fails to make an imaginative offering of its own, writes Peter Smisek.

The third installation in MAXXI’s Studio Visit series – in which contemporary designers are invited to dive into the museum’s architecture archive and create an installation based on their findings – has opened last week. The title of the exhibition: L’Immaginazione al Potere (All Power to the Imagination) is a reference to the 1968 student protests and subsequent decade of unrest across western Europe and Italy.

Supported by manufacturer Alcantara, the creative direction of the 2020 edition has been entrusted to the German designer Konstantin Grcic. Unlike previous editions of Studio Visit, in which Nanda Vigo and Formafantasma paid tribute to Paolo Soleri and Pier Luigi Nervi respectively, Grcic has cast his net much wider. Not only does he draw inspiration from four radical architects and their projects, but also from the programme’s patron.

Grcic has chosen an array of references - from 1970s Italian architecture to theoretical proposals by Bernard Khoury. Courtesy of Alcantara, MAXXI

Drawing inspiration from Italian ‘fantastical architecture’ of the 1960s and 1970s, Grcic has chosen to showcase projects from Guiseppe Perugini, Maurizio Sacripanti and Sergio Musmeci, as well as the rigorous, imaginative approach of contemporary Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury. His resulting installation is meant to help the viewer contemplate the power of radical imagination. ‘I was not familiar with the work of these Italian architects work I started,’ explains Grcic, but he was soon won over by the radical formal imagination. ‘If you look at this bridge,’ he says pointing at Bridge over the Basento, a 560m long crossing supported by a single, finger-like reinforced concrete, ‘you can just Musmeci calculating this by hand in a course of days, without the help of computers.’

Perugini’s structuralist Casa Sperimentale, a megastructure shrunk to the size of a home, and Sacripanti’s unrealized pavilion for the 1970 Osaka Expo, a spiralling, rotating building that would reconfigure its internal spaces, are among the other drawings from the archives that Grcic has chosen to showcase as it moves, serve as a call to radical imagination. The fourth architectural drawing that is included is Bernard Khoury’s competition for the Beirut Museum of Modern Art. Here, the architect imagines the building as a process of excavation, a void to be filled once artists, curators and administrators ‘create spaces […] that Lebanon’s arts deserve.’ The proposal is imaginative and radical, but it also serves as an open-ended critique of Lebanon’s art. In this sense, it is also unlike the more confident, assured Italian projects.

The resulting collage imagines a kind of utopia built on impressions of radical architecture. Courtesy of Alcantara, MAXXI

Alcantara’s namesake suede-like material makes an appearance in the shape of a close-up image of its fibre. Grcic makes a not-wholly-convincing case that the development of the material, a high-end synthetic leather substitute manufactured in Italy since 1972, required a radical imagination, not unlike that of the architects. Together, these images are collaged to create a large-scale digital painting that seems to presents a possible future Utopia, or maybe its overgrown ruins. Either way, Grcic didn’t want to ascribe too specific a meaning to his work. But he did supply a rather comfortable bench superstructure and a sound installation, creating a more immersive experience and inviting the audience to contemplate how to recapture this radical imagination and invent its own utopia.

But there is more to utopian thinking than simply surveying past radicalism and trying to infuse it with a vague environmentalist agenda. We should question how economic and cultural conditions in the 60s and the gave rise to ‘fantastical architecture’, and whether those conditions and impulses can indeed be channelled in productive ways. A call to imagination is fine, but it may not be quite enough.

Designed just after World War II, in a bombed out aeroplane factory in Italy, the Vespa has been a classic since the day it launched

With innovative design, a shapely frame and its perfectly timed launch – plus a little help from Hollywood – the Vespa has come to signify freedom and essential Italian style. The iconic design, its name almost synonymous with the word scooter, was instantly a source of intrigue when it launched in 1946 and it quickly made a new name for aircraft manufacturer Piaggio. With its narrow waspish waist, concealed engine and lightweight design, the Vespa was quickly popular and was especially well adapted for women, who could ride the scooter in skirts because of the step-through frame.

Now well into its 70s, the Vespa’s appeal hasn’t waned and rising fuel prices and lack of parking make it a convenient option for today’s urban commuters and for buzzing around town.

The invention of a classic

The Vespa was born just after the Second World War ended in a bombed out aeroplane factory in Florence, Italy. The Piaggio factory had been dedicated to making military aeroplanes and train parts until it was severely damaged in Allied bombings and was no longer able to continue with aircraft production. On top of that, the Allied forces had put heavy caps on Italy’s aircraft industry after they won the war.

In 1946, under the watch of engineer Enrico Piaggio (the son of the factory founder), the company turned its efforts to scooters. Piaggio would soon become one of the biggest manufacturers of scooters in the world.

Enrico Piaggio wanted to provide post-war Italians with a modern, affordable mode of transport. Two of his engineers came up with a prototype that featured a few of what became the Vespa’s innovations. The MP5, nicknamed the “Paperino” (“duckling” in Italian), had handle-mounted controls, bodywork that fully enclosed the engine, and small wheels, but it had a high central section that the rider would have to straddle.

Piaggio wasnt satisfied with the look of this early prototype and he commissioned aeronautical engineer Corradino D’Ascanio to improve on the design. D’Ascanio famously hated motorcycles, thinking of them as bulky, dirty and unreliable. He addressed these problems in his new scooter design.

Designing an appealing shape – with a practical purpose

Since the first Vespa the scooter has been known for its painted, pressed-steel unibody, which completely conceals the engine at the rear of the bike and protects the rider from dirt and grease. It also features a large mudguard and solid body that protect the driver and give them somewhere to put their feet. It has small wheels, meaning it is manoeuvrable and easy to control. It also meant that it was easy to carry a spare tyre – useful on the winding Italian roads and the post-war streets where potholes were common. It was small, cheaper and far more sexy than any motorbike on the market.

The narrow waist and sound of the engine led Enrico Piaggio to immediately proclaim, “it looks like a wasp!” The word Vespa means wasp in Italian. He christened it on the spot.

The Vespa launched in Rome in 1946 and was an instant success. Vespa Clubs popped up all around Europe and by 1952 had over 50,000 members. A few years after the scooter launched, Piaggio added a hook for a bag below the seat, modified the engine's cooling system and added the standing leg to prop it up. The company constantly adapted and improved the Vespa. There were also several experimental models including sleek, aerodynamic racing editions as early as 1947 and even a Bazooka Vespa, built especially for the French Ministry of Defence in the mid 1950s.

Greater than any ad campaign Vespa could have come up with was the appearance of the Vespa in the film Roman Holiday, in a various scenes with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. The film reportedly led to over 100,000 sales. It also appeared in Dolce Vita, and more recently in The Talented Mr Ripley, Jamie Oliver’s TV cooking shows and Gwen Stefani’s music videos. The Vespa is still seductive today, and though many companies around the world have tried to imitate it, it is as much of a classic as ever.

The best products from this year’s Salone del Mobile has a dual focus on sustainability and colour

Our selection of products from Salone del Mobile 2019 spans furniture and fittings, with new works from Barber & Osgerby, the Bouroullec brothers and Patricia Urquiola. Across the week, sustainability came to the fore once again in some of the most innovative designs, and inventive collaborations brought unusual uses of material, colour and texture.

Vases Decoupage by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra

The Bouroullecs delivered a range of vases for Vitra, pictured above, channelling the ever-rising trend for craftsy, handmade ceramics. Clean, straight lines and neutral palettes receded further into the background as designers across the fair emphasised cheerful colours, spontaneous handcraft, and the kind of joyful scrawled lines seemingly sprung from a child’s sketchpad.

On & On chair by Barber & Osgerby for Emeco

The clue is in the name with Barber & Osgerby’s On & On chair, created for Emeco. The stackable, rounded seat design is made of rPET, a combination of recycled PET bottles and fibreglass, which is highly durable and can be recycled over and over again. It comes in muted colours inspired by nature.

Patricia Urquiola rugs for cc-tapis

Cc-tapis showed a whole range of collaborations, including with Martino Gamper and David/Nicolas. The new collection of rugs by Patricia Urquiola were some of the standout pieces – inspired by Fordite, a material made from layers of enamel paint used in car manufacturing, each rug gave the impression of being a layered cross-section using a mix of jewel and neutral tones.

Wireline by Formafantasma for Flos

With the return of Euroluce, lighting shone through at this year’s Salone. The most playful and innovative was to be found in Flos’s installation at S.Project, a new area reserved for interdisciplinary interiors products. Among these was Formafantasma’s Wireline, a playful series of hanging belts, attached to tubes of light, which are reminiscent of exposed power cables.

The recycled aspect of Fordite also inspired their creation, with the Himalayan wool, silk and aloe used coming from excess material from cc-tapis’ production processes.

Matthew Day Jackson furniture for Made by Choice with Formica

Artist Matthew Day created the Kolho range for Finnish manufacturer Made by Choice using Formica laminate and curved plywood. The smooth, curved form belies Day’s inspiration – the surface of the moon. He designed a bespoke Formica laminate to represent the lunar surface and the curved arms and legs to form a swooping contrast.

The collection comes in several colours, including an out-of-this-world green.

It was the car that drove Italy’s economic miracle, swerving past the Vespa to become Italians’ favourite ride – but it never escaped the sense that its designers were having a bit of a laugh, says Brendan Cormier

Think of a ‘people’s car’, and your mind might turn to Volkswagen (the name literally means that, after all), the Nazi-led project to build an affordable car in 1930s Germany. Or maybe the Citroen 2CV, designed by polling thousands of French citizens about what they wanted out of a car (a boot large enough to fit a whole live pig, apparently). Add to this list the Morris Minor, the Mini, the Trabant, the Lada, and some unifying characteristics start to emerge: there’s an obvious economy to this group, both in their shape and price tag. But there is also a more elusive quality: they are all somehow ‘fun’.

The most fun and also funniest of them all is the Fiat Nuova Cinquecento. It’s not slapstick funny – like the bumbling Italian-accented Luigi in the Cars movie franchise, who dons the avatar of a Cinquecento – but a more knowing kind of funny: as if after 50 years of global car production, there were enough designs out there to start having a bit of a laugh. The most impressive thing about it, however, is that after first rolling off the line in 1957 with all its jocular flare, it would go on to help permanently change the landscape of modern Italy.

The dream of a people’s car came to Europe surprisingly late. Stateside, Henry Ford had unlocked the secret to cheap mass production as early as 1908, with the introduction of his bare-bones no-nonsense Model T. Being the first truly affordable car for the middle and working classes, it soon dominated the field, becoming the de facto car of the people wherever it was sold. European car companies were transfixed by the Americans’ success, and making a pilgrimage to Detroit to witness first-hand Ford’s factories became a must for any ambitious car entrepreneur.

Giovanni Agnelli, who founded Fiat Car Manufacturing in 1899, made multiple trips to Ford to see if the moving assembly line miracle of the Midwest could be translated to his factories in the foothills of Piedmont. Inspired by what he saw, he hired the architect Matté Trucco to build him a modern new production facility on the outskirts of Turin. In 1916, construction began on the fabled Lingotto site – a poetic yet impractical translation of Ford’s assembly line into a veritable architectural machine: parts would enter at ground level, gradually get assembled as they moved up and through, and emerged on the roof as fully made cars ready to be driven around a rooftop racetrack before heading down into city streets.

Lingotto was where Agnelli’s first attempt at a people’s car was realised: the Fiat 500 Topolino. Designed by engineer Dante Giacosa and launched in 1936, it was lauded for its unique look and diminutive shape, and provided a relative success for the company. But the interruption of the Second World War marred the car’s sales. Meanwhile, the Lingotto production facility was proving to be more an elegant architectural folly than a factory capable of producing at the scale of Fiat’s American competitors.

Undaunted, the company relaunched its bid for an affordable people’s car in the early 1950s. During that period, sales of small motor-scooters such as the Vespa were sky-rocketing and Fiat was keen to produce an affordable alternative. Giacosa was tasked with stripping down a car design to its barest essentials. The Nuova Cinquecento was deliberately made bulbous and round to avoid the use of excess metal. It had a large hole cut out of the top for similar reasons – given a fabric top and cleverly rebranded as a sun roof. Giacosa also took a cue from Volkswagen and moved his engine to the back, which allowed for more interior space. When it debuted at the Turin Motor Show in 1957, it was not an immediate hit. The motor was too small and the amenities too few to attract a wide demographic. The company pivoted by offering slight variations in its models, more options, and more horsepower.

The strategy worked and sales gradually rose – in 1957, only 12,000 were sold, by 1962, 108,000, and in 1970 sales reached a high of 351,000. In fact, 1970 was the peak year of production for Fiat’s Italian operations across the board, with 1.4 million cars produced by a labour force of 100,000. The Cinquecento had been key to unlocking Giovanni Agnelli’s dream of harnessing mass production to reach figures unheard of in Italy.

As for the users of the Cinquecento, the timing couldn’t have been better. This was Italy’s miracolo economico. People found they had money to spend, and the state had money to build. Thousands of kilometres of highways were built across the country, and although the Cinquecento was heralded as the ultimate city car, able to navigate the narrow vicoli of Italian towns, it was also used as an important way to get out into the countryside.

For better or for worse, today Italy is one of the most car-centric nations in Europe. Virtually every household owns one, and parked cars fill up disproportionate amounts of public space. The proliferation of cars in Italy is in large part thanks to Fiat and the Cinquecento, which put car ownership into the hands of millions for the very first time. That’s a big feat for a small car.

Materials, nature and design: May's issue looks at the relationship between architecture and its materials, exploring alternatives to concrete and plastic and exploring the theme through the Milan Triennale

Broken Nature is the theme for the Triennale and it is central to the questions around sustainability that the design industry is grappling with. In this month's issue we find out about exciting new bio materials, buildings that breathe and the artist giving light a physical form. Plus, our preview of Salone and Milan Design Week

A word from Priya Khanchandani, editor of Icon:

It is easy to exoticise materials in design, from the smoothness of marble to shimmering gold, when in reality we barely pay heed to their role in the natural world. This year’s Triennale in Milan, showing until September, is a clarion call for nature’s most basic elements to be paid greater respect, before we realise what we have let slip away.

In one film, we witness the intimate bond between an octopus and an ammonite shell it adopts as its home – a reminder that our habitat is a part of us. A reliquary of objects, from a drop of clean water to a collection of mineral rocks, spotlights the substances we take for granted and projects a future where a drink could become more precious than a diamond.

Creative experiments with new materials, like bricks fabricated from algae-based biomaterials or composites of cornstalk and mushroom mycelium, are a glimmer of hope that humanity doesn’t have to be reliant on substances like plastic and concrete, which are damaging our planet each day. And a collection of tableware made of food residue like vegetable scraps, eggshells and bones that have been burnt into charcoal, then moulded, shows what can be done with waste in landfills, which is currently decomposing into toxic methane.

Materiality couldn’t be more fundamental to design and architecture. It is at the heart of everything we make and consume. In this issue, we consider why recycling plastic cannot save the planet, how architecture can be more transparent about its composition, and put forward concrete as a crime against the environment. We also talk to designers Studio Ossidiana and Jordan Söderberg Mills, whose work conveys a strong focus on materials.

As we warm up for the biggest design week of the year, the Salone del Mobile in Milan, it couldn’t be a better moment to be soberly reminded that nature is broken, and that design can either contribute to humanity’s squandering of natural resources or play a part in strengthening our bonds with the material world.

In this issue: Reacting against minimalism, we look at the creativity of mess, and artist Nelly Ben Hayoun talks about doppelgängers and space orchestras. Elsewhere, we look at the architecture of dreams and speak to Ellen van Loon

Bruno Munari's dizzyingly versatile body of work has always been hard to categorise. But he had the rare ability to alchemise the ordinary into something luminous, writes Rick Poynor.

In a photograph taken around 1945, Bruno Munari is on the telephone. Leaning back on a table, he holds the receiver to his ear. His expression is attentive but wry. He might be serenely fascinated by his caller, or he could just as easily be bored. In his other hand he lifts a pair of scissors to the phone’s twisted cable. One snip and the connection will be severed.

The artfully staged image conveys the essence of the great Italian artist and designer: witty, playful (always playful) and paradoxical, a new kind of modern philosopher of form and a tireless experimentalist. Munari made captivating use of photos to signal his discursive inclinations. In a famous series of pictures, available today as a poster, he struggles to get comfortable in an armchair, climbing all over the recalcitrant upholstery, contorting his body, and finally turning the chair on its back. It was a lesson in ergonomics conceived, around 1950, as a piece of comic theatre that anticipates performance art.

One of Bruno Munari's Articulated Structures

Since his death 20 years ago, Munari’s reputation has soared. In his lifetime he was highly visible, especially in Italy, yet somehow never fully celebrated as the major cultural figure he was, because his highly original and prescient output fell somewhere between art and design. We might now acknowledge that this interzone exists, since there are numerous examples, but institutionally and critically, where it counts, we still don’t entirely allow for it. If the Munari exhibition mounted in Turin last year were to come to London, would it belong in Tate Modern or the Design Museum? These temples are predicated on the idea that visual production needs to conform to the dictates of one discipline or the other. To place Munari in either would be too restrictive.

Munari appears to have been untroubled by the issue, happy to conduct his researches in-between. He drew attention to the categorical dilemma in the title of his essay collection, Design as Art, rediscovered and reissued in English in 2008 after decades out of print. ‘The designer of today re-establishes the long- lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing,’ he writes. ‘There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use.’

Bruno Munari's Sculture da Viaggio

To this end, Munari unfurled a dizzying versatility. Alongside his sprightly critical writing, ever aware of the reader, he was a painter, a graphic designer, a deviser of three-dimensional objects (or are they sculptures?), an illustrator, a poet, an inventor and a teacher. He began as a futurist and cited Marinetti as an influence, though he quickly moved on. He was a dedicated constructor of ‘useless machines’. These dangling aerial mechanisms, which pre gured the mobile, were his way of domesticating the ‘monster’ of technology. He was also a prolific fabricator of ‘unreadable books’. These delightful objects had no text whatsoever, concentrating instead on the formal and tactile treatment of the pages’ shape, colour and texture, with lines, threads and cut-outs.

Books were such a vital medium for him that his oeuvre was collected in a survey titled Munari’s Books, reissued in 2015. These include a book of his machines with humorous diagrams, his ABCs conceived for children (he was acutely sensitive to the young mind’s learning needs), his more formal texts about design, and a book of experiments with Xerox when the technology was still unfamiliar. In one of these photocopies, manipulated with Munari’s customary lightness of touch, he gives himself five sets of eyes – that feels about right. When he got to grips with an everyday design challenge, he could alchemise the ordinary into something luminous. The Abitacolo (1971) is a bed, a climbing frame, a storage space, a shelving system and an endlessly adaptable den. It’s hard to imagine a child that wouldn’t love to own one. He could think like an angel.

]]>FeaturesTue, 10 Apr 2018 10:29:06 +0100Zaven: ‘When we design something, we like to give it meaning and a relation to something else.’https://www.iconeye.com/design/features/item/12702-zaven-when-we-design-something-we-like-to-give-it-meaning-and-a-relation-to-something-else
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If you can design one thing, you can design everything, wrote Massimo Vignelli. Venice-based duo Zaven are out to prove it. From product design to graphics to installations, they’re causing ripples far beyond the Grand Canal

‘Design isn’t the best job in the world,’ says Marco Zavagno. ‘But it’s the best job for us.’ The designer describes Zaven – the rising Italian studio he formed with partner Enrica Cavarzan in 2006 – as an outlet for their joint passion. Based in Venice, where they met and studied, the designers work fluidly across product design, graphics and installations – three modes of design they see as inextricable from each other.

The scope of their portfolio is impressive: visual identities, scenography, exhibition catalogues, furniture, homeware, electronics and accessories are all treated with a sophisticated eye. The cross-disciplinary approach has a strong precedent in Italy and the pair subscribe to the Massimo Vignelli philosophy of Design is One: ‘If you can design one thing, you can design everything.’ Although the outputs seem diverse, they are bound by the sense that all design is essentially about communication. ‘It’s totally normal for us to mix these things,’ says Cavarzan. ‘For us, the graphics are part of the product itself.’

Chipo rug for cc-tapis (2017), handknotted from Himalayan wool

The broad abilities of the studio are down to Cavarzan and Zavagno’s varied routes into design and, more practically, a need to be flexible in order to keep the studio in work as they grow. After studying at the Università Iuav di Venezia, Zavagno went on to be a senior designer at Fabrica in the years Jaime Hayón was head of department, working in both interaction and product design. Cavarzan decided to do a postgraduate degree in visual arts, meeting influential curators and artists, which led her to start producing catalogues and exhibitions.

Zaven’s projects often begin by creating a tome of visual references, handed to the client as a starting point. Such a book was produced for Nike when the duo was selected as one of ten designers to contribute to the Nature of Motion exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2016. Asked to explore ideas around the Flyknit trainer fabric, the designers responded with The Athletes, a series of striking red lamps. Each lamp had an impossibly thin metal stem rising from a perpendicular base, arching or slanting to support a strip bulb and a Flyknit fabric diffuser. The forms were inspired by the graceful lines of athletes’ moving bodies, with a conscious nod to the sculpture of Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro. ‘The basic input from Nike was to express something about technology, but we also wanted to relate it to sculpture,’ says Zavagno. ‘Every time we design something, we like to really give it some meaning and a relation to something else.’

Zaven is keen to seek out more research-oriented projects like The Athletes. After the Nike exhibition, the designers were approached by Knoll to develop prototypes around our future use of the workplace and home. Unlike collaborations that have ended with a single outcome, such as the Lola dining chair for Atipico or the Duo daybed for Novamobili, this one is open-ended. Playing the role of designer as researcher, rather than author, also seems to suit their studious style and perhaps reflects the passing of the age of superstar designers. ‘If you design a chair, you know where you are going with it,’ Zavagno says. ‘[The Knoll project] is really challenging because you are constantly filtering what is interesting and what is not.’

Words

Riya Patel

Above: Extra vase (2014), made using the traditional technique of ceramic extrusion

Wood Wood Wood (2015) – the nine furniture pieces have UV edges that can be seen in blacklight

The 2015 solo exhibition Wood Wood Wood at Milan’s Triennale Museum was a chance for the designers to play to all their strengths in product, graphics and environment. The opportunity was used to explore the studio’s visual language through nine furniture pieces, which Zavagno calls ‘a three-dimensional alphabet’. The collection is expectedly abstract, but also strangely familiar. Intersecting planes of black, white and orange are treated with a retro palette of textures that recall Formica laminate and Artex plaster – a nod to the time of Wim Crouwel and Ettore Sottsass. The exhibition was designed to be viewed in two modes: in daylight and in blacklight, which revealed the edges of the furniture to be coated with UV paint. ‘In the darkness you couldn’t see the furniture, just the edges. We had the idea of developing a language in hidden and visible form.’

The side project, Something Good, also allows Zaven to enjoy the total responsibility of art direction, curation and even production. After a successful venture in Milan in 2013 with a small exhibition of homeware prototypes made with local artisans, the studio researched how to produce the items in batches. ‘In our area there are a lot of craftsmen we like to collaborate with and research how to do new things,’ says Zavagno. The Extra vase (2014) is a stunning example of this. It was made by reviving the forgotten technique of ceramic extrusion with master potters in the town of Nove. The result is part industrial, part craft – a machine-made form that still bears the imperfection of the handmade.

Zavagno and Cavarzan. The duo founded Zaven in Venice in 2006

It’s a curiosity for craft that keeps Zaven’s work grounded. Bending three-dimensional objects to a two-dimensional whim, or designing with a strict visual code in mind, often leads to shallow aestheticisation, or simply bad design. The pair say that each new material they work with brings a new challenge for them to master – most recently a collection of carpets for the French brand cc-tapis. Zavagno says: ‘Of course, the first idea we had was from a graphic point of view. We wanted it to look a certain way. But our client told us they could make it more interesting by using a certain type of knot. When you start a project, you might think you know how it works but there is always a lot to understand first.’

With another of Venice’s design sons, Luca Nichetto, having departed for Stockholm early this year, it’s encouraging that the designers have chosen to root themselves locally. Zaven is often talked about as part of a new wave of Italian design, a label they dislike but recognise as an honour. They hope to work more internationally, but Venice may just give them their best shot at a Gesamtkunstwerk yet. Opening this spring, the restored Palazzo delle Zattere that will house the V-A-C Foundation for Russian contemporary art will feature Zaven’s communication, wayfinding and even scenography for its first concert.

An independent streak runs through Italy’s 20 regions, reflected in their mish-mash of local flags. Lombardy’s Studio Temp calls for a little visual unity

Between the fall of the Roman Empire and unification in 1861, Italy was divided into several states, each with its own identity. This has created a great cultural heterogeneity – today, all 20 regions still have their own emblem. These are diverse and difficult to reproduce, except in one case: in 1975, Lombardy asked Bob Noorda, Roberto Sambonet, Pino Tovaglia and Bruno Munari to design a new emblem. They adapted the ‘rosa camuna’, a mark found in cave engravings made at Valcamonica in the Iron Age.

Taking this as a starting point, we decided to rethink the emblems to create a uniform system. The range we had to tackle was very wide: some regions, such as Calabria and Puglia, are represented by heraldic concoctions; some, such as Emilia-Romagna, have anonymous geometric logos; while others, such as Veneto, have pictorial emblems. We adopted four strategies:

• Creating a new design using a simplified, graphic element related to the region’s history

• Simplifying the existing emblem

• Taking a detail from the existing emblem

• No redesign at all (Lombardy).

We looked at the flags of Japanese prefectures and of Swiss cantons for inspiration, studying their simplicity of form, consistency of colour and heraldic references. We limited our palette to seven colours and made the stroke weights consistent. The resulting emblems can be used in single colours and at small sizes.

In the lead-up to Salone del Mobile in Milan, we take a peek at some of the city's sumptuous and often hidden away modernist entrance halls

An upcoming book, Entryways of Milan, provides a glimpse of some of Milan's most striking entrance halls. Often hidden from public view behind restrained facades, these entryways are dazzling examples of Italian modernism, designed between 1920 and 1970 by such illustrious figures as Gio Ponti, Giovanni Muzio, Piero Portaluppi and Luigi Caccia Dominioni. Above are some images from the book.

This year’s international furniture exhibition will be accompanied by the biennial Euroluce lighting fair and the second edition of Workplace3.0, dedicated to the design and technology of the working environment. This year will also mark the 20th edition of Salone Satellite, the event’s influential showcase of young designers.

Over five frenetic years in the 1930s, Francisco Salamone cut a swath across Argentina’s rural east, bringing his own distinctive brand of futurist art deco to all manner of public buildings. While Salamone has been all but forgotten, his extraordinary legacy remains

The heartlands of the Pampas, the endless swaths of flat grasslands that characterise the landscape of the rural Buenos Aires Province, seem an unlikely location for experimental architecture. Yet it was here that the Italo-Argentine architect Francisco Salamone built his most unmistakable and significant works, the first examples of modern architecture in rural Argentina.

During a prolific period from 1936 to 1940, he completed more than 60 works, including scores of town halls, cemetery portals, slaughterhouses and plazas. They were built across numerous small towns as part of a municipal development programme of unprecedented scale.

Santiago Chierico’s angel of death at Azul cemetery

Words

Vanessa Bell

Photography

Emma Livingston

His level of productivity seems almost inconceivable, averaging more than a work a month over the four-year period

The concave and convex lines of the entrance hall at Laprida’s cemetery

A sofa at Laprida town hall with built-in ashtray

An escarapela (Argentine crest) at Carhué town hall

Salamone was born in Sicily in 1897, moving with his family to Argentina shortly after. The son of an architect, he followed in his father’s footsteps and gained a degree in architecture and civil engineering from the National University of Córdoba in 1920, and it was in this city – Argentina’s second largest – that he began to practise his trade.

Little is known about his early career, other than that it was beset by failed projects. He fell out with the head of the Central Society of Architects, and also found working for large corporations problematic. In 1932, he was commissioned by the local council in Villa María, a city in Córdoba Province, to work on a variety of public projects, most notably the Plaza Centenario. His experimental approach to the scheme’s central fountain and lighting was a taste of what was to come and this period marked a turning point in his career, when his distinctive style began to take form.

The main entrance at Azul

On moving to Buenos Aires in 1935, he approached the local government and soon made the acquaintance of Manuel Fresco,a doctor, conservative politician and admirer of Mussolini who was elected governor of Buenos Aires Province the following year. The coup d’état in 1930 had marked a shift from a liberal to an authoritarian political ideology, with increasing electoral fraud and corruption. Fresco had generous funds at his disposal, and contracted Salamone and respected architect Alejandro Bustillo to work on his ambitious public building programme.

Driven by Fresco’s conservative mandate, the ambition was to instil a sense of pride, order and community spirit in these towns, discouraging the migration that was hampering growth. Fresco fully appreciated the strong association between architecture and ideology, and was aware that Bustillo was a great admirer of the Nazi architect Albert Speer. Yet, based on the correspondence that has survived between the governor and Salamone, it seems the relationship was essentially a professional one, with no suggestion that Salamone shared either his fascist sympathies or his religious faith.

The fountain at Laprida

Carhué’s town hall

Salamone was given a remarkable amount of freedom to experiment, with few financial or creative restraints. In a province the size of France, the level of productivity seems almost inconceivable even by today’s standards, averaging more than a work a month over the four-year period. Camping out on site, he was actively involved in every project, delegating only the construction. Influenced by a lifelong love of cinema, he cultivated a uniquely personal style, incorporating elements of art deco, functionalism and futurism, all constructed on an epic scale made viable by the use of reinforced concrete.

Salamone’s creations are manifestations of a Hollywoodesque vision of the future. His town halls in particular, with their austere proportions, clean lines and pure facades are clearly influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and other cinematic and cultural references of the time.

The monumental cemetery portal at Saldungaray, with tormented face of Christ carved by Chierico

While his projects shared an aesthetic thread, Salamone never duplicated any of his designs, whether for specific building typologies or for the lighting and benches in his town plazas. In particular, cemetery portals and slaughterhouse towers allowed him to experiment outside purely functional design. In the southern town of Coronel Pringles, the square art deco tower on the slaughterhouse is spliced in two by a fin that mimics a butcher’s knife; in Guaminí, the abattoir’s rounded tower is heavily influenced by both expressionism and futurism, with spherical tiered platforms that still give it a space-age appearance today.

Unfortunately, there is no centralised body that manages Salamone’s estate – surviving structures are handled locally by individual councils. At Rauch, copies of his plans remain, many ripped and torn from negligence. In addition to detailed drawings for the town hall’s exterior, he also left plans for custom-built furniture and light fixtures – much of it remains in situ, some in use, some untouched. Similarly, an eccentric geometric sofa and armchairs continue to furnish a conference room at Laprida’s town hall.

The entrance hall at Coronel Pringles

Salamone left nothing to chance, giving strict instructions of specific species to be planted in each town plaza, carefully considering hardiness and the unique properties of each. He also hired the sculptor Santiago Chierico for many of the municipal projects, who was able to recreate their geometric style – for instance in the distorted facial contours of the guardian angel at the cemetery in Azul, or Christ’s contorted face on the spherical portal at Saldungaray and at the giant crucifixion at the Laprida cemetery.

He was also a keen artist, and painted his architectural creations. In Guaminí, two such examples have survived, discovered rolled up in a damp cupboard and now displayed in an office in the town hall. Salamone liked to draw caricatures poking fun at well-known public figures of his time such as Roosevelt and Churchill – these angular portraits, which he affectionately dubbed ‘archicaturas’, were exhibited in 1932.

The space-age slaughterhouse at Guaminí

Salamone is said to have drunk copious amounts of coffee and smoked up to 100 cigarettes a day, leading to serious health complications in later life, including diabetes and soaring blood pressure. In 1940, when Fresco’s term as governor came to an end, so too did his public building programme, almost as abruptly. Sadly Salamone was never able to match the work he produced during his time under Fresco. He died in relative obscurity in 1959, an event overshadowed by a much-anticipated visit by Greta Garbo to Buenos Aires. There were no mentions in any national newspaper, bar a small paid announcement funded by his family.

While his town halls and cemetery portals have weathered well despite their continued use, technological advances in farming have rendered the slaughterhouses obsolete, with subsequent exposure to the elements and pigeon infestations taking their toll. Although his works are now protected by the state, many of Salamone’s personal records have been lost over time, so scant information remains about the man himself or his working processes, fuelling the mystique surrounding his fantastical legacy. A photographic exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1997 to mark the centenary of his birth finally revived interest in Salamone, following decades of obscurity, but it remains to be seen how his astonishing work will be preserved in years to come.

The eternal city is resting on its laurels, writes Vilnius-based studio New! It’s time to give it a little more direction

How is it that one of the most breathtaking cities in the world has a rather sad visual identity? We’ve heard that Rome crushes designers’ ambitions – there is so much beauty around that it’s almost useless to try and create something new. We dare to disagree – a strong identity could help us to enjoy the city with a new perspective. In addition, Rome is a hugely popular place for a city break. Even if locals shrug at our ideas, this work is aimed at people coming to the city: curious visitors, wanderers and explorers.

Rome is an open-air museum. The air is thick with history – even the shabbiest churches or most desolate monuments would be welcomed by most places as the most beautiful objects in their city. Everywhere you turn, there is something to make you give a sigh of pleasure: ‘Ahhh!’ Every church you enter is ‘grande’; every fountain your eyes rest on is ‘bellissimo’. There are so many ‘ahhhs’ that we decided to rename Rome the ‘Museum of Ahhh!’ It’s a slogan, but also a metaphor for a game you can play in the city: behind every corner there’s something waiting to be discovered.

We’ve chosen a contemporary serif font, Eksell Display Large, for the wordmark. It blends modernity with hints of ancient letterforms. This reflects Rome itself: rich in history but always moving forward to match contemporary lifestyles. The new wordmark is often displayed alongside an arrow symbol containing the slogan ‘Museum of Ahhh!’, to be used coherently across applications. This arrow highlights the directional aspect of the identity – we aim to make Rome more accessible to tourists, enabling them to discover secrets hidden across this legendary city.

We’ve chosen ‘Ahhh!’ as the slogan to communicate the joy of wandering and discovering. In addition, the concept of an interjection becomes a useful tool to highlight the expressiveness of Italian culture – emotional, passionate and always charming. After all, you are visiting a city where relaxed lunches turn into evening feasts, where history decorates every corner, where a delicious gelato has to be eaten fast before it’s consumed by the summer heat.

The first Zaha Hadid project to be completed since her death is, like much of her best work, both alien and part of the landscape, write Stefano Boeri and Mario Coppola

The Maritime Station of Salerno – Zaha Hadid’s first posthumous work – is a hybrid between a port and an oyster, evoking the topography of the surrounding Amalfi coast. The structure was constructed in concrete, cast in situ on the pier making use of traditional techniques, but it is also one of the first works designed with the help of 3D-modelling software from the film industry. This was essential to the continuity of the sculptural asymmetrical shell, with its swings, joints and movements, within which the space of the terminal flows softly.

If it is true that, with its double-curvature geometry, the building forgoes in part a relationship with the city, it is also true that this lack is redeemed by the delicacy of the light, diaphanous body, which seems to stretch out, opening up to the sea. By means of thin steel pillars, the roof is detached from its base, turning the space towards the Mediterranean, which itself enters through some vibrating gills/windows.

In the ‘sea cavities’ of the shell, in the shadows of its cantilevers, the complex (from ‘cum plexus’, or woven together) turns into a tense, enveloping skin around the seamless, fluid space that is a key feature of Hadid’s work. A darting, sensuous ramp allows passengers toslide up next to the service core and find themselves suspended over the entrance, before moving outside through a bridge everted out of the rectangular casing, emphasising again the osmosis of exterior and interior, body and space, architecture and nature. One discordant note is a light wooden covering that, almost like a vertical parquet, wraps the central body of the interior, offering an involuntary heaviness.

As with Rome’s MAXXI – a hybrid between the buildings of via Reni and the Tiber – Hadid’s architecture in Salerno seems to be aimed at forcing the ‘natural’ to come out from the ghetto in which it has been placed by Western tradition. Too often, it is perceived as the opposite of culture: an ‘otherness’ on which to impose, and from which to distance and differentiate. And, again like the MAXXI, the effect works. The landscape, its morphogenetic forces, the ‘non-human’, all become part of the project and of its architectural language, almost like a body (for isn’t the body made of topographies, rivers and ramifications?), and its elements mesh with the urban context. The result is an almost topological geometry – with neither tears nor extensions – that merges floors, walls, roof and connective elements in a unique, immersive space, which, as in the best works by Hadid, evokes the harmony that exists in the landscapes of nature.

Words

Stefano Boeri and Mario Coppola

Above: The asymmetrical shell was designed using 3D-modelling software from the film industry

As with Rome’s MAXXI Hadid’s architecture in Salerno seems to be aimed at forcing the ‘natural’ to come out from the ghetto in which it has been placed by Western tradition

Death, war, family feuds – the story behind the infamous, enticing hot tub has it all, says John Jervis

OK, if you’re after a few quick-fire witticisms about chest wigs, Hugh Hefner and Hot Tub Time Machine – nostalgia and smut, with an affectionate salute to Ferris Bueller thrown in – you’ve come to the wrong place. The story of the Jacuzzi is so much weirder, and richer, than that. It starts with seven eponymous brothers who migrated to California from north-east Italy, escaping the destruction and military service brought by the First World War. There they dabbled in orange picking and copper mining, but it was the troubled genius of the eldest, Rachele, together with the new markets created by the war, that forged their road to riches.

Rachele’s first invention, ‘the Jacuzzi toothpick’, was a laminated propeller so effective it gained contracts from American and Russian airforces. Orders slowed when the war ended, so he went the whole hog, developing the Reo, the world’s first monoplane with a large, enclosed cabin. Aimed at the new United States Air Mail, it crashed on a test flight, killing four, including one of the brothers.

The Reo patents were sold, but other ideas followed, such as ‘Frostifugo’, which blew warm air across orange groves to keep frost away. But it was Rachele’s ‘Jacuzzi Jet Injector Pump’ that hit pay dirt. Using technology adapted from heat exchangers in plane engines, water was injected into the ground at pressure, creating a vacuum to pump water up from depth. Coinciding with the explosion of agriculture in San Joaquin Valley, demand was brisk, but Rachele sunk into depression, publishing fanciful schemes for solar-powered generators, vertical lift-off planes and even a proto-United Nations with fascistic overtones. All fell on deaf ears, and he died unexpectedly in 1937.

Candido, the youngest brother, came to the fore, but his transformation of the business came from an unexpected moment of inspiration. To ease the systemic arthritis of his young son, he created a homemade spa in 1949 by adding an air intake to an agricultural pump, reversing the flow, then plunging it into a bathtub. This portable contraption attracted attention from the medical staff tending his son, and went on to receive its first patent three years later.

On reaching the market, the ‘Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath’ met with some success, helped by regular appearances as a prize on quiz shows, but only became a world-conquering business after it was incorporated into a moulded bath with multiple seats in the late 1960s. The surge of demand for this ‘Whirlpool Spa’ quickly tore the extended, ill-prepared family firm apart. Both name and business were sold off in 1979 to a fire-extinguisher company, and acrimonious legal battles followed – lawyers continue to circle the Jacuzzi legacy to this day, putting an end to this retelling of the family’s story.

Yet the market for spas – indoors and out – went from strength to strength as materials and technology improved. The Jacuzzi seemed impossibly desirable in 1980s Britain, its name a shorthand for an entire industry. Today, sadly, they’ve become a byword for depravity and bad taste, along with avocado bathrooms, fake tan, blonde perms and pampas grass. But I cling to my memories of the ageing Roger Moore massaging Fiona Fullerton’s shoulders to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet overture in a steaming hot tub for 1985’s A View to a Kill. Is it possible we’ve lost a certain something in our ceaseless, censorious pursuit of sophistication?

Words

John Jervis

Above: More than just ‘bubbles and a place to serve friends wine’, claims a 1979 ad for Jacuzzi

The Jacuzzi seemed impossibly desirable in 1980s Britain, its name a shorthand for an entire industry

The lighting designer’s restaurants – one of which was today named as the world's best – are about darkness as much as illumination

It’s an artistic style that dates from the 17th century, but for lighting designer Davide Groppi, tenebrism is utterly modern. The effect, which dramatically contrasts light and shadow, is one often used by Groppi – for instance in such celebrated restaurants as Le Calandre and Osteria Francescana (which was today named the world's best restaurant of 2016), both in the north-east of Groppi’s native Italy.

Blame it on a return to city-centre living (often contributing to a diminution of space to entertain in private homes), or simply Groppi’s nationality, but the restaurant for him represents the most important place where we socialise today. It is a place for a tête-à-tête, to share some closeness with friends or family – but in a public place, with the atmosphere of hubbub and the clattering of silverware.

Sampei 440 floor lamps at Osteria Francescana, Modena

For La Calandre, the restaurant of famed chef Massimiliano Alajmo, inspiration was drawn from the pioneer of tenebrism, Caravaggio, and his early Supper at Emmaus – a dinner of two disciples and Jesus – in which only the table top and the faces around it are illuminated.

“The darkness,” says Groppi, “is just as important as the light ... The idea is to have the light mainly on the table. When that happens, you feel unique in the restaurant. You don’t care about the other people – you’re focused on your company and what you’re eating.”

Groppi’s Ovo suspension lamp, also at Le Calandre

Light, for Groppi, is an “ingredient” – it helps to create the atmosphere that in turn influences your overall experience, including the taste of your food. Groppi said to Alajmo about La Calandre: “You need to work from the dining room, not only from the kitchen.”

It has been said: “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.” What begins with Groppi might, in essence, be a return to the restaurant lighting of the early 17th century – but it’s most welcome.

The head of the eponymous mosaic brand explains how it has brought the ancient art into the digital age – with a little help from some star designers

Creative partnerships with big names such as Alessandro Mendini, Marcel Wanders and India Mahdavi have ensured that the Italian tiling and mosaic brand Bisazza now possesses a robust reputation in the design world. At Salone, the 60-year-old company will add to its collection a pattern by Studio Job based on Britain’s industrial revolution, incorporating steam engines, locomotive wheels and factories, all in a warm shade of amber. Rossella Bisazza, who runs the company with her brother Piero, told us more about its work.

ICON Over the past 15 years, you have consciously sought to collaborate with designers. What prompted this?

ROSSELLA BISAZZA When my brother became chief executive in 2000, that was the turning point: we decided that, if we wanted survive and be different from competitors, we had to become a design company. Our work with designers has since become vital – with their ideas and creativity, they push the boundaries of our product. Mosaic is an ancient, noble tradition, but a contemporary eye brings it into the 21st century. We give our designers complete freedom to express themselves.

ICON Have your methods changed over time, too?

RB Most of our patterns are now created digitally, which means any image can be translated into mosaic. But we also continue the ancient tradition of cutting by hand. Recently, we’ve started mixing old and new – for example, by making the background digitally and the foreground by hand.

ICON What have your most significant collaborations been?

RB Our first art director Alessandro Mendini broadened our colour palette and created our first patterns. Fabio Novembre first used mosaic as a skin, to cover rounded surfaces. We’ve worked with Marcel Wanders for more than ten years, and he has used mosaic to cover products such as coffee tables, as well as a Cadillac, which is on display at the Bisazza Foundation, our museum and headquarters in Veneto, where there is also a small jet designed by Jaime Hayon.

At the end of last year, we launched a collection of cement tiles by Tom Dixon inspired by his home town, London – details like the bricks, the walls, the cracked pavement, the pebbles. Personally, I like to work with women – design is a male-dominated field, and when you see the work of people like India Mahdavi and Paola Navone, you can tell a woman was behind it.

ICON Could you tell me more about the Bisazza Foundation?

RB In 2012 we brought together the installations and art pieces we have around the world to create a proper collection. We opened the Foundation with an exhibition by John Pawson. He’s the father of minimalism and we’re known for decoration and colour, but we liked that contrast – he designed a beautiful pavilion for meditation in a mix of delicate and natural colours. Richard Meier did an installation of 14 pillars covered in white mosaic, very pure and sensual. Mosaic can be very minimal, but it’s not like simply painting a pillar white – it has soul and texture and can be very expressive.

Every year we develop new projects and host exhibitions relating to design, architecture and photography. So it’s a mix of culture, design, inspiration and, in the end, also business. My brother and I, we don’t have children, so in a way the foundation is like a child to us.

In our latest issue, we look at Milan's Salone del Mobile, and ask whether the city's design industry is trying to reclaim its radical past

No less than the boss of Ikea recently announced that the world, the western one at least, had reached ‘peak home furnishings’. OK, so in the grand scheme of things an over-furnished lounge is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the idea of reaching ‘Peak Oil’. I mean, no one is likely to bomb around a desert in a death machine made of scrap metal dressed like a Burning Man reject because they couldn’t get their hands on a Billy bookcase.

But given our cluttered lives and the ecological ramifications of unbridled consumer culture, it is hardly surprising that some of us in the design world have a mildly troubled relationship with the Milan Furniture Fair. If you have ever wandered the Fieramilano’s cavernous halls filled with stuff, mainly chairs, it is pretty much guaranteed you will experience a ‘who buys this crap?’ moment. In these circumstances, it is easy to forget just how influential Italian design has been and, historically, the Salone has been pivotal to this.

Yet, after 55 years it still has the capacity to engage. This year heralds the return of the Triennale as an exhibition. Though very much framed by 1972’s seminal Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York, even down to its name, Rooms: Novel Living Concepts, it feels like Milan is making a genuine attempt to set the agenda again. All will be revealed come April, but for now Icon tantilises you with a striking cover image from the upcoming exhibition courtesy of Fabio Novembre.

Reinvigorated by its alliance with Boffi, the venerable Milanese brand is venturing outside the Italian market, says David Michon

Fernando and Maddalena De Padova made their name in Milan as the first to import the now-classics of Scandinavian design in the 1950s, and then by launching an eponymous furniture brand in 1984. Yet they never made major waves outside Italy. Today, however, De Padova is poised to take that step – with help from Boffi, which purchased the company in April.

Action has been swift: Boffi’s art director, Piero Lissoni, has already minimally refined (“invisibly retouched”, he says) a handful of De Padova designs, with the remainder to be revisited by Salone del Mobile in April 2016. And, since October, De Padova has a new showroom – an opportunity to convey the brand’s updated message.

Having occupied a prominent shop on Milan’s Corso Venezia, with double-height windows looking onto two busy roads, the showroom is now tucked away – a destination – in what was once the atelier of Dolce & Gabbana. It’s designed with great intimacy, reflecting a focus shift from “furniture” to “living”: it’s as if you’re walking into someone’s (very stylish) apartment. Partnerships with Altai, Flos, Gaggenau and Domenico Mori, among others, pull together almost turnkey-solution rooms, from bedroom to kitchen. “It was our idea for many, many years to integrate Boffi with another company – to bring our activity to the rest of the house,” say Boffi’s chief executive, Roberto Gavazzi.

From the late 1990s it had looked for the right partner, but never reached a deal. Talks began with Maddalena 15 years ago, but she was unwilling to push De Padova abroad. In 2010, her son Luca took over and, though he was more open to the idea, he still needed convincing: “He’s a careful man,” says Gavazzi. Economic difficulties in Italy, however, meant that few options existed but going international, and Boffi – another Italian brand of high quality – was a cultural fit and a global platform. De Padova will now be popping up in Boffi showrooms, from Denver to Shanghai.

Words

David Michon

Above: De Padova describes its new space as “a big industrial loft”

It was our idea for many, many years to integrate Boffi with another company – to bring our activity to the rest of the house

Alfonso Bialetti’s espresso machine was originally a symbol of modernism and empire during Mussolini’s heyday. But its engagingly simple operation and distinctive design have become the epitome of Italian style

First patented in 1933, the Moka Express – a distinctive eight-faceted perculator – is a design classic, a piece of humble kitchenware that is now in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Design Museum. It’s a simple device with three parts: the user pours water into a base, up to the line of a safety valve, drops into this a funnel loaded with coffee, and then screws on a collecting chamber into which the coffee condenses. The ritual of putting it together has something of the satisfaction one imagines comes with assembling a gun. Turning on the stove, one awaits the characteristic gurgling noise that heralds a Vesuvian eruption of aromatic coffee.

The Italian manufacturer Alfonso Bialetti invented the Moka during a period of ascending fascism. His coffee pot was made of aluminium, which Mussolini hoped to make the national metal of Italy, a country rich in bauxite. An advertising campaign from the time described the metal as “AVIONAL” and “ANTICORDIAL”, neologisms that evoked airplanes and the everlasting, a modern world of speed, sturdiness and strength. The Moka seemed to embody Italy’s unyielding destiny, a little machine that – after the fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 ensured a steady supply of coffee beans – united the empire and modernism. It was no accident that Marinetti, the father of futurism, described himself as the “caffeine of Europe”.

Before Bialetti invented the percolator, home-brewing kits dribbled hot water over coffee grinds, resulting in a taste completely unlike the espresso bought in coffee bars, with their complex machines resembling steam trains. At a time of economic struggle, the Moka used pressure to extract the best from the bean, bringing this taste – and the requisite crema – to the home. Bialetti got the idea from the laundry methods used by local women doing washing on the shores of Lake Orta: they boiled their load over an open fire in a pot with a lid and a central pipe, which drew up the soapy water and redistributed it over the laundry.

During the 1930s, Bialetti manufactured about 10,000 units a year but production was halted by the war. When his son, Renato, returned from a German POW camp, he took over the business, marketing the Moka, self-consciously, as a design object. In the early 1950s, during the annual trade fair in Milan, he conducted massive advertising campaigns, for which he rented every available billboard. These adverts featured the Moka, and a slogan promising “In casa un espresso come al bar” – an espresso at home just like in the bar. In 1956, the entrance to the fair was dominated by an enormous sculpture of a Moka, at least 6m high, pouring an endless stream of coffee into a waiting cup.

From 1953, the Moka featured the company mascot, an avuncular little man with a black suit and impressive moustache, a caricature by Paul Campini of Renato Bialetti, his hand up as if ordering another espresso. The Moka was sold as a masculine object – men were to feel comfortable in the guise of a barista as they brewed their masculine beverage. The “l’omino coi baffi” – the little man with a moustache – appeared in television adverts and, in a state-of-the-art factory in Omegna, northern Italy, production shot up to 1,000 units a day. The design has changed very little over the past 80 years and, to date, an estimated 330 million units have been sold. Nine out of ten Italian homes have one, and consequently the Moka has become a symbol of Italy, as saturated with nostalgia as the Fiat 500 or Vespa scooter.

Words

Christopher Turner

Image: Luke J Albért

Turning on the stove, one awaits the characteristic gurgling noise that heralds a Vesuvian eruption of aromatic coffee

In Milan next week, the architect is launching Double Zero, a luxurious dining chair that will be the forerunner to a whole series. For our current issue, we travelled to the Italian brand's factory in Udine to watch him put final touches to his design

David Adjaye is launching a formal dining chair for Moroso at Milan Furniture Fair next week – a design that will be the forerunner to a family of high stools and chairs.

Double Zero's tubular stainless-steel frame comprises two circles that support the back and seat, and a welded structure of arms and legs. The whole is given added rigidity by an angled footrest.

"With Double Zero, I felt that the beauty of lines and space, which were so important at the beginning of the 20th century, had disappeared in furniture design," Adjaye told Icon on a visit to the Moroso factory in Italy in February. "I'm trying to bring back that quality of balance and counterbalance, exploring what I call opaque and transparent systems."

Last year the architect designed a series of chairs for Knoll, and he spoke to Icon during the factory visit about the differences between architecture and furniture design. "There is this thought that somehow furniture is small architecture," he said. "It's not really, it's a different exercise, a much more specific exercise. What I really enjoy is that, with a building project, I'm starting with a loose frame and defining it through the process, but with furniture I usually have a precise inspirational form, and then try and make sense of it in the world."

Pick up a copy of our May issue, Studios – available now – for the full story behind David Adjaye's Double Zero chair and Icon's visit to the Moroso factory

Words

John Jervis and Debika Ray

There is this thought that somehow furniture is small architecture It's not really, it's a different exercise